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Out of Place: A Memoir Paperback – 12 September 2000
by Edward W Said (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 255 ratings
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From one of the most important intellectuals of our time comes an extraordinary story of exile and a celebration of an irrecoverable past. A fatal medical diagnosis in 1991 convinced Edward Said that he should leave a record of where he was born and spent his childhood, and so with this memoir he rediscovers the lost Arab world of his early years in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt.
Said writes with great passion and wit about his family and his friends from his birthplace in Jerusalem, schools in Cairo, and summers in the mountains above Beirut, to boarding school and college in the United States, revealing an unimaginable world of rich, colorful characters and exotic eastern landscapes. Underscoring all is the confusion of identity the young Said experienced as he came to terms with the dissonance of being an American citizen, a Christian and a Palestinian, and, ultimately, an outsider. Richly detailed, moving, often profound, Out of Place depicts a young man's coming of age and the genesis of a great modern thinker.
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Out of Place
Edward W. Said
3.98
2,992 ratings360 reviews
Edward Said experienced both British and American imperialism as the old Arab order crumbled in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
This account of his early life reveals how it influenced his books Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. Edward Said was born in Jerusalem and brought up in Cairo, spending every summer in the Lebanese mountain village of Dhour el Shweir, until he was 'banished' to America in 1951.
This work is a mixture of emotional archaeology and memory, exploring an essentially irrecoverable past. As ill health sets him thinking about endings, Edward Said returns to his beginnings in this personal memoir of his ferociously demanding 'Victorian' father and his adored, inspiring, yet ambivalent mother.
GenresNonfictionBiographyMemoirHistoryBiography MemoirAutobiographyPolitics
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295 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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About the author
Edward W. Said204 books3,480 followers
(Arabic Profile إدوارد سعيد)
Edward Wadie Said was a professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies. A Palestinian American born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the United States by way of his father, a U.S. Army veteran.
Educated in the Western canon, at British and American schools, Said applied his education and bi-cultural perspective to illuminating the gaps of cultural and political understanding between the Western world and the Eastern world, especially about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East; his principal influences were Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Michel Foucault, and Theodor Adorno.
As a cultural critic, Said is known for the book Orientalism (1978), a critique of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives the Orient. Said’s model of textual analysis transformed the academic discourse of researchers in literary theory, literary criticism, and Middle-Eastern studies—how academics examine, describe, and define the cultures being studied. As a foundational text, Orientalism was controversial among the scholars of Oriental Studies, philosophy, and literature.
As a public intellectual, Said was a controversial member of the Palestinian National Council, because he publicly criticized Israel and the Arab countries, especially the political and cultural policies of Muslim régimes who acted against the national interests of their peoples. Said advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state to ensure equal political and human rights for the Palestinians in Israel, including the right of return to the homeland. He defined his oppositional relation with the status quo as the remit of the public intellectual who has “to sift, to judge, to criticize, to choose, so that choice and agency return to the individual” man and woman.
In 1999, with his friend Daniel Barenboim, Said co-founded the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, based in Seville, which comprises young Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab musicians. Besides being an academic, Said also was an accomplished pianist, and, with Barenboim, co-authored the book Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002), a compilation of their conversations about music. Edward Said died of leukemia on 25 September 2003.
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Ahmad Sharabiani
9,564 reviews7,477 followers
February 13, 2022
Out of Place: a memoir, Edward W. Said
In all the early years of my life I was an awkward student: a Palestinian studying in Egypt, with a small English name, an American passport, and no identities ... After 1948, when My family was displaced to Egypt, I spent all my education in the first class of British private schools, which were established to nurture a new generation of Arabs with deep ties to Britain.
Edward Said was born in Jerusalem, and brought up in Cairo, spending every summer in the Lebanese mountain village of Dhour el Shweir, until he was banished to America in 1951.
This work is a mixture of emotional archaeology and memory, exploring an essentially irrecoverable past. As ill health sets him thinking about endings, Edward Said returns to his beginnings in this personal memoir.
Date of the first reading: 16th day of March 2004 AD Title: Where are you? Author: Edward Said; Translator: Ali Asghar Bahrami; Tehran, Wistar, 1382; on 439 pages; ISBN 9645507472;
The subject of the biography of the Palestinians of the United States of America - Edward W. Said from 1935 AD to 2003 AD - 20th century
Edward Said's autobiographical memoirs
Quote from the book:
Throughout the early years of my life, I was an unusually awkward student: a "Palestinian" studying in "Egypt", with a An "English" first name, an "American" passport, and no clear identity...; After 1948, when my family was displaced to Egypt, I spent all my schooling in top British private schools, which were established to raise a new generation of Arabs with deep ties to Britain; The last one was "Victoria College" in "Alexandria"; "King Hussein of Jordan", and a number of ministers, prime ministers, and famous future "Jordanian", "Egyptian", "Syrian" and "Saudi" businessmen were my classmates and contemporaries; Of course, a famous figure like "Michelle Shalhoub" was the main torturer there, who is known as "Omar Sharif" in the world of cinema; End of quoting update date 05
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Buthaina Al-Issa
Author 24 books26.9k followers
March 28, 2022
I read Edward Said's biography motivated by a question: What are the circumstances of upbringing that could produce a thinker of this type? I read two books by him last year: (Culture and Imperialism) and (Power, Politics, and Culture), both of which were an extension or variation on his most important work - which I have not read yet - which is Orientalism.
I was imagining, first of all - and I am ignorant of everything - a leftist upbringing of some kind, a family that engages in politics at the dining table, and academic excellence that indicates early genius. On the other hand, I found a terrified child in front of a giant father, with a strange similarity to what Kafka wrote in “A Letter to the Father” and even Paul Auster in “The Invention of Solitude.” The ambiguous mother - manipulative and caring - as necessary, and the sisters who are present as distant shadows. It is the story of a family that was good at flogging and pampering a child who - ironically - did not live up to his aspirations, starting with his “soft mouth” and “big hands” and ending with his school behavior.
Edward moved between many schools, and his teachers all agreed that he was a “hopeless” case. Thus, the school often appears in Edward Said's biography as a cold, repressive apparatus, a scene of bullying from peers and abuse from teachers. Something reminds me of what Stefan Zweig wrote in his wonderful biography, “Yesterday’s World.”
The most valuable thing about this biography is that it was written with great transparency, and Edward Said’s sentences have a delightful ring to me, which I have mentioned many times. His celebration of everything that is complex and ambiguous, his ability to make up his mind, and his restraint in the face of decisive expressions. A person of this intellectual makeup was, despite his conservative language and caution, a revolutionary in academic circles, and I believe that we in the East all owe it to him to free us from the reductionist narratives of the West that we have often ended up adopting.
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Ahmed
910 reviews7,658 followers
February 18, 2016
Out of place..... Edward Said
is an American thinker of Palestinian-Arab origin. He grew up between Jerusalem, Cairo, and Alexandria and immigrated to America to make a great name for himself. When adversity befalls him, he remembers his mother cause in order to be devoted to it and become one of its greatest defenders. Doesn’t he deserve a biography that will be immortalized? Is there a memory of him? He deserves it and does not need it. His writings bear witness to his extreme greatness, and his name has become a source for many studies and books that translate that greatness.
What prompted Edward Said to write this biography was the diagnosis of his illness as (leukemia), so he chose to leave his entire experience written in the hope that it would provide some benefit.
One of the most beautiful and complete autobiographies that I have ever come across in my life (and I think I have read many of them), is the one that presents you with all aspects of a person, with all sincerity and with all comfort. Said puts you with him in all his memories, so you feel that you are with him in his home, his father’s strict guidance and His caring mother, facing the ridiculousness of his teachers and their racism towards any Arab, travels with him to Palestine and returns from there to Cairo, a complete biography in every sense of the word.
The biography is very focused, especially with the stages of Saeed’s childhood, and the stages of his life in Cairo. He talks about Cairo with all charm, brothers. You never imagine that he is just a passing Palestinian. No, he was Egyptian, not by nationality, but by livelihood. His talk about the stages of Cairo is very important, in it. A depiction of the life of the communities at that time, and through that depiction you can provide a general picture of what Cairo was like before the 1952 movement and Nasser’s assumption of power. Rather, it shed light on the abhorrent Nasser dictatorship, during the death of one of his relatives, who was accused of communism, and his burial in a way that does not befit any human being. They prevented his friends from seeing his body and revealing it.
Quite simply: Edward Said is one of the most important Arab intellectuals ever, even when he integrated with American society and became a stature in it and reached the highest levels of teaching and theorizing, but he maintained his identity, an identity that we may live our entire lives in the homeland and lose, a man with a living conscience and A vibrant mind, which was sometimes a curse to him (from my point of view). The way he thought about everything that surrounded him, even his family, left him with hidden complexes. The soundness of his conscience and the maturity of his mind were the greatest curse in that, as the complex and intertwined structure of his family and his distant and sophisticated outlook made him repeat He accurately depicted his life, revealing details that remain in his memory to this day.
An iron memory, a very intertwined and intensely diverse culture, an amazing linguistic knowledge and an exceptional mastery of more than one language by virtue of his upbringing, a clear, burning mind, a sense of perception of the highest quality, an amazing charisma that appears clearly between the lines, all of which are the ingredients of a great thinker and intellectual, immortal in memory. Thank you, Edward Said.
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Sawsan
1,000 reviews
January 31, 2022
Edward Said did not embellish himself in his memoirs. He wrote in the introduction that “he does not intend to offend anyone’s feelings, but he must be true to his memories and experiences
. He wrote these memoirs during his illness and treatment for leukemia. Is a person during severe illness more bold and honest in expressing himself, his feelings, and his life?”
Edward, in his childhood and youth, suffered from shyness, a lack of confidence, and an inability to integrate with others. He suffered even more from parents who were constantly and severely critical of every word and action. He remained
confused between his Arab and American identity for a long period of his life until he returned strongly to his Arab identity after the defeat of 1967.
The book tells in detail. About the period of his childhood and early youth only, but during the story he passes through some events from his life up to the time of writing these memoirs and political events in both Egypt and Lebanon.
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Salma
400 reviews1,206 followers
December 5, 2013
Update: Posted a long review
, which is a memoir of his childhood... This
book shocked me a little. Who would believe that a researcher, author, intellectual, and strong person, as he appears in his writings, to be as confident in what he knows as Edward, was suffering from a lack of confidence, shyness, repression, and fear of His parents are to this degree, and they hate school and are extremely sensitive... He
and his grandmother are like me in many things, and that, frankly, encouraged me a lot: H
I loved to pass on this advice in which I found what I needed to escape the shyness that I also feel: H
(And it was the most difficult of difficulties. I like people to look at me and to meet their gazes in kind. I mentioned this to my father when I was about ten, and he said, “Do not look at them eye to eye, but look at their noses,” so he handed me a secret technique that I have used for decades.) p. 85
Amazing advice, isn’t it? ?
Then he continues: This is another piece of advice for those who wear glasses (and when I started teaching shortly after my graduation in the late fifties, I found myself having to take off my glasses so that the class would turn into a blurry mass in which I could not distinguish anything. And to this day I still find it unbearably difficult to see myself in person. The television screen, or even to read what is written about me)
and I think what one of his colleagues described when he read the book is completely true, which is that some of what was contained in it would not please a person except to his psychiatrist.
The language of the book is very strong, like his book Orientalism, and it is precise and full of feelings and Rich, with a difference between the two books, of course, in the level of complexity and treatment of the different subject matter...
If someone else had written about Edward's life, he would have written about a luxurious, happy, and easy life... However, the writer was Edward himself, and he was showing us the world through his own eyes. In the eyes of an overly sensitive person, his world seemed tired and heavy... This
book only talks about the years of his childhood and early youth... And indeed it is a lot of fun and more encouraging...
2007
---
The previous short review
The language of the book is strong. Very like his book, Orientalism, it is precise, full of feelings, and rich, with a difference between the two books, of course, in the level of complexity and treatment of the different subject matter... If
someone else had written about Edward’s life, he would have written about a luxurious, happy, and easy life... However, The writer is Edward himself, and he was showing us the world through his own eyes, through the eyes of an overly sensitive person, so his world seemed tired and heavy...
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Quo
298 reviews
March 6, 2023
Edward Said's autobiography Out of Place suggests that even the most gifted on inhabitants of this planet can be forced to endure a lifelong sense of exile. Said was a gifted scholar & writer who also had a considerable ability as a pianist but who felt an almost constant feeling of dislocation throughout his life, whether living in Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon or the United States.
Much of Out of Place is a bildungsroman or coming of age story, with Edward Said being shifted from one school to another in his Palestinian birthplace, celebrating his 12th birthday on what he terms the inception of the "Balfour Declaration" in 1947, disrupting life his Jerusalem neighborhood.
Next, he is off with his family to Cairo where his father decided that his business interests would prosper to a much greater degree, especially given the increasing uncertainty in Palestine. In Cairo Edward has to adapt to a school with a distinctly British curriculum, full of international students, many the children of diplomats as well as wealthy Egyptians, one of his fellow students being a boy who later became film actor Omar Sharif, after a name change.
Eventually, Said again has to adjust to yet another new school, this time an elite boarding school in New England, each time being forced to deal with a somewhat new identity.
As an Arab-Christian living in the Middle East, whose parents hold a coveted American passport and especially in Egypt, Said always feels himself something of an outsider and the awareness of loss as his old Palestinian area is marginalized with the birth of the nation of Israel & a return to his former roots doubtful, only complicates his struggle to define himself.
There is what seems like a fairly typical boyhood quest to comprehend his parents, with his father pushing & prodding him at every step on the road to maturity, warning him about defiling himself through masturbation & worried about his lack of excellence as a student, but with a rather more positive identification with his mother who seems a compatible spirit.
Reading Hamlet as an affirmation of my status in her eyes, not as someone devalued, which I had become in mine, was one of the great moments of my childhood. We were two voices to each other, two happily allied spirits in language. I knew nothing conscious of the inner dynamics that linked a desperate prince & adulterous queen at the play's interior, nor did I really take in the fury of the scene when Polonius is killed & Gertrude is verbally flayed by Hamlet.
We read together through all that, since what mattered to me was that in a curiously un-Hamlet-like way, I could count on her to be someone whose emotions & affections engaged mine without her really being more than an exquisitely maternal, protective & reassuring person.Beyond being a precocious reader but an occasionally delinquent student, Edward Said falls under the passionate grip of music, much of it classical and is transfixed by the sounds of Jeanette MacDonald & Nelson Eddy, Richard Strauss, Paderewski, Paul Robeson, Deanna Durbin & Bach.
Later, he discovers Wagner & longs for Bayreuth, birthplace of Wagner's Ring Cycle. Said reminisces that he can date his most important musical discoveries, almost to the minute, all of them occurring in private & away from the hectoring demands of his piano instructors, suggesting that...
this disjuncture between what I felt about music & what I actually did in music seems to have sharpened my memory considerably, allowing me first to retain, then to play over in my mind's ear, a sizable number of orchestral, instrumental & vocal compositions without much understanding of period or style.It is his passion for music, that first brought Edward Said to my serious attention, though I'd taken a shot at reading Orientalism & had time run out before my library edition was no longer renewable, having found the book rather difficult reading. When Said met conductor Daniel Barenboim, just by chance it seems, though they knew of each other's reputation and connection to Palestine/Israel, they quickly form a deep & lasting bond.
I became fascinated by the depth of their friendship and their work together on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, founded in 1999, composed of Arabs, other Muslims from throughout the Middle East & Israeli Jews who are brought together to make music but who in many cases form lasting social as well as musical bonds with each other, this in the face of opposition from parents & governmental forces on all sides.
This endeavor, continuing after Said's death in 2003, represents a heart-warming story in an area of great tension & more than occasional animosity.
Finally, Edward Said, having emigrated to the U.S. with his parents following large-scale unrest in Cairo & the torching of his father's prosperous business there and after his graduation from prep school, becomes an undergraduate at Princeton, where once again, he fails to fit in with the "poisonous social atmosphere" of the exclusive "Eating Clubs" on campus. In spite of the social isolation at Princeton, he excels as a student, changing his major in mid-stream from Pre-Med to Humanities.
Then it's off to Harvard for a PhD & eventually a tenured position on the faculty at Columbia. For someone like Edward Said who became a scholar known in large measure for his commentary on the cultural impact of the west & colonialism on the Middle East and the defining, occasionally controversial nature of his views on "Orientalism", there is, by way of a preview, almost nothing about that in his autobiography. He does mention that the only Arab he encountered while a graduate student at Harvard was American-born Ralph Nader, a student at the Law School.
Said comments that as an adolescent, he was completely in the grip, "at once ambiguously pleasant & unpleasant, of time passing as a series of deadlines", an experience that stayed with him throughout his life.
What prompts the autobiography is the realization that there is a more ominous deadline, "attempting with reasonable sense to live in his own system of time while dealing with the diagnosis of leukemia", a disease that would ultimately cause someone who had for so long felt out of place to ultimately be out of time. The autobiography focuses extensively on how someone caught between cultures has to struggle to craft an identity.
I was very taken by the dust jacket comments in support of Out of Place by Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer, Kenzaburo Oe and especially by Salman Rushdie who spoke of the Edward Said autobiography as "an intensely moving act of reclamation & understanding" by someone who like Rushdie has lived a life between cultures, suggesting that Said "has given eloquent personal expression to the experience of multiplicity--its torments & confusions but also its liberations & possibilities, encompassing both gift & loss."
*The 1st & 2nd photos are of Edward Said, while the 3rd is of Said with Daniel Barenboim.
autobiography-biography classical-music coming-of-age-tale
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Pazuzu
74 reviews33 followers
July 26, 2014
So… reading the memoirs of Edward Said, you know the same person who wrote major books like Orientalism; Culture and Imperialism; Power, Politics, and Culture; etc. When you pick up his memoirs, you probably have a shitload of expectations, and even if you tell yourself it will be the opposite of your expectations… You’re still not prepared for this book.
You will not see “The Palestinian”, you will not see the profile of the Arab that makes Americans and Europeans uncomfortable. You will not find the Nakba in the life of Edward Said. You will also not find the praise of pan-Arab super stars, no glorification of Abdel Nasser, no passion for Om Khoulthoum, no particular passion for Shami food.
So now that I have mentioned what you won’t find, or the expectations that will be shattered… This book is by all means amazing. This is a very genuine memoir. It tells the tale of a child/teenager that was socially awkward, shy, unconfident, raised in the typical heteronormative upper Middle Eastern middle-class family. A harsh, capitalist, hard-working, distant father, and an over-protective, mostly emotionally manipulative mother that lives through her kids.
You will also find tales of the Europeanized Arabs, the excellent British/American schools, the concerts, the non-Arab Christianism, and the padded rich Zamalek lifestyle.
That being said, this book is a priceless memoir of an amazing mind. With the first chapter I personally related to the introverted childhood that Said struggled with. I was also fascinated to see the unflattering description of his parents. It is clearly the memoirs of a dying man, he no longer wants to censor his words. Some people complaining that they were expecting to find the seeds of his intellectual journey and were disappointed not to find it. I disagree, throughout the book you can clearly see how this man came from extreme privilege (as well a terrible need to please) and slowly but bravely deconstructed the complex dynamics of power, money, hegemony, and erosion of history.
Not to mention that I found some incidents and descriptions shattering, describing the situation of Palestinian refugees (regardless of their initial status) after the occupation of Palestine, in Cairo in specific, as well as the actual changes to his family’s life. And he lays the foundations of his future understanding of intersectionality by talking about militarization, the oppression of the left in Cairo (and by extension of all secular Arab dictatorships), not just the token-heroes, but also the impact on their families, the silence that grows slowly but inevitably around their stories, how insignificantly people have died, etc.
And finally when reading this book, you will see Edward Said grow, from the pleasing child, to the passively rebellious teenager that took the blows but silently “Unlearning the inherent dominative mode”. I am not saying this is an easy read or that the analysis I am claiming is clear. It is my own perception of this book. But quite frankly, if you took the time and energy to read this book then I don’t see how you could miss these points.
PS: If you are excessively into Oum Koulthoum and/or Omar al Sharif…. Don’t read this book.
edward-said memoir owned
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The Khansa
353 reviews819 followers
March 8, 2014
Getting involved in two interesting books is a luxury I cannot stand. I will write about it, God willing
.
Warning: A review that can be edited and added.
Edward spoke here a lot about Cairo in the forties, the period when many nationalities migrated there after the war, the Armenians, the Christian Levantines, the Greeks, and many Englishmen and European Jews. Fleeing the Holocausts of Nazism, this cosmopolitan period in the history of Cairo, which some view with nostalgia and overwhelming romanticism (the movie Heliopolis is an example), Saeed wrote about it almost from inside it or next to it, from the area that he was prevented from crossing at the Al-Hazira Club, which pays its full fees because he is “an Arab.” “He holds an American passport and citizenship, because the British colonial administration saw that even if he was an American, he remained Arab in appearance and origin, of a lower rank and was not entitled to use all of the club’s facilities, even if the land was Arab, and from the moment he learned that Arabic was spoken inside Victoria College. Forbidden as a crime,
in his memoirs there is detailed talk from within English and American schools in Arab cities, where they impose their values, teachings, ideas, and curricula, not just their language, and talk about green meadows, while they overlook vast deserts. The students know England’s topography, plains, and valleys, its history, and the names of its ruling dynasties, while they are ignorant. Almost everything about their country in which they live, ignorant of its weather, geography, cities, language, history, and rulers. The
confusion that occurred to him between the Arabic and English languages until his death, reminded me of Darwish’s line about him,
“I have two languages, and I forgot which one I was dreaming about.
I have an English language for writing
, a flexible vocabulary,
and I have a language for dialogue.” The sky
with Jerusalem, silver in tone
, but it does not obey my imagination.”
His constant feeling that he is out of place, for he
“walks on the wind. And in the wind
he knows who he is. There is no roof for the wind,
no house for the wind. “And the wind is a compass
to the north of the stranger.”
A Palestinian who does not live in Palestine, an American who was not born or lived there, an Arab who lives in Cairo but is not Egyptian, who studies in an English school and not in English, and on top of all that has a name with a strange combination, the first name is English and the second is Arabic.
“He says: I From there, I am from here
and I am not there, and I am not here.
I have two names that meet and separate...”
He was honest and transparent to a terrific degree. He exposed much of the inner self, its secrets, delusions, thoughts and complexities. What is interesting is that he exposed himself first of all, then his parents. His relationship with them he analyzed extensively and talked about for a long time (I was thinking how dare he He
summarized many of the relationships between fathers and children when he said about his father, “He came to make his way in life, and I came to play the role he had drawn for me.”
His hesitation between Edward’s template, which was shaped by the environment and circumstances, and his inner world and the contradiction of the two personalities, then his rebellion against keeping the former an eternal problem.
He mentioned that he was traveling. With his family on the train from Bab al-Hadid station in Cairo to Jerusalem, a journey that took twelve hours until 1948 AD. It made me feel sorry for our time.
The story of Farid Haddad, the Palestinian doctor residing in Cairo who died under torture, affected me. His personal qualities and his dedication to serving and caring for others, how They killed a person with these qualities?!
The personality of Charles Malek and his talk about him occupied me and aroused my interest. How did one of the drafters of the United Nations Human Rights Charter, and a student of Heidegger, turn out to be among the Phalange and one of the leaders of the civil war in Lebanon?
On the other hand, after his talk about Charles Malek, I now understand Said’s clear, direct, and sharply sarcastic tone in the book The Intellectual and Authority (or The Gods That Always Fail) about the betrayal of the intellectual.
All the quotes are from the poem “Tabaq” by Mahmoud Darwish.
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hayatem
714 reviews167 followers
September 18, 2020
Memoirs written by a pen free from the burden of the self
and the other...from his childhood to the age of dismantling identifications (his relationship with his parents/authority and methods of parental treatment.), and his fear of his physical identity to the formation of his cultural and political-human identity and the general chaos that permeated it in his being and the body of the self (feeling With complexity) + The torments of Palestinian identity and exile (his search for his own extent.)
He translated the houses of memory with a critical sense, and in a wonderful esoteric narrative style.
Edward Said reflects a transparent and shy personality.
Other
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Mustafa
316 reviews262 followers
November 30, 2023
Reading the memoirs of the Nakba generation continues with its contradictions, that is, between the childhood of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who made stones cry from poverty, to the life of the luxurious Edward Said, in which Palestine does not appear as a place and an event in the same way as America and Cairo appear. However, the memoirs of this generation remain very important, and their main contribution is that they are an unofficial history far from numbers, decisions, and battles. These memoirs interrogate people who have begun to appear in pictures, most of which are black and white, and do not speak or speak. As for the value of Ed’s memoirs in themselves, they are written in a style that is rarely found in other countries. Arabic literature in general, this method of abstraction and writing about oneself and one’s family as if it were a trial, was presented by Youssef Chahine in his boring films, but his genius move was that he presented it anyway, and I don’t know who else in the Arab world wrote memoirs in which there was a surgical operation on the self and the past without any cover-ups or A modesty like Edward Said, and far from all that, it is a captivating memoir, and its world is captivating and frustrating at the same time.
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Ahmed Almawali
630 reviews372 followers
December 19, 2016
It has been a while since I postponed reading these memoirs. The reason for this is its thickness, as it is approximately four hundred pages of large pieces, and therefore requires a tireless soul and a passionate desire to read. Edward did not intend to write these memoirs until after he was afflicted with leukemia, which led to his death. He seeks to squeeze the memory and take his reader through the forests of his childhood, from Jerusalem and Cairo, and the afternoons between which he moved. Although the first and third were the scene of his summers, his connection with Cairo remained deep, and this became clear when his situation settled in America and he was prevented from coming to it. I see that he gave extensive detail in this stage that disrupted the second stage, which is the stage of higher study, the formation of ideas, his interest as a critic, and his struggles in the Palestinian issue. One of the most beautiful things about the memoirs is that our friend introspects himself a lot and tries to explain some of the situations and feelings that come from him and attribute them to the remnants of his childhood, or the authority of a strict and resolute father, or the compassion of a caring mother, who has a significant amount of space in his conscience and hence his memoirs. The book is too big and beautiful to include in a review, and it is one of the books worth reading
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Imad Al-Atili
Author 11 books592 followers
March 30, 2018
"I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance".
• Said mentioned in his last interview (2003) that the object of his memoir was mainly to revisit his relationship with his mom and dad. And, in my opinion, after reading the memoir I believe his father's had the biggest influence over him - that's why he talked about him more, and even portrayed him more acurately than he portrayed his mother.
• Said's father drew my attention; his character is very complex and his feelings towards his wife and children were infathomable to me. That's the type of characters I love the most.
• In the book, Said talked about alientation and how his 'exile' in America helped to shape the person he was. His story didn't end up well, and he didn't live happily ever after. Until his last breath he remained out of place, searching hopelessly for identity.
• One of my favorite quotes in this book is what Said wrote in the last page:
"with so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place".
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Sajjad thair
204 reviews115 followers
April 18, 2019
This book is not the memoirs of one of the most influential Arab intellectuals of the previous period, but rather the memoirs of any Arab teenager. Despite the difference in time and the economic and social situation between our period and the period of the writer’s emergence, the same elements that most male adolescents experienced were experienced by Edward, from the strong, domineering, affectionate father, through to the generous mother, but who pampers her children too much, all the way to sex, women, and the red lines that we cross in secret, despite everyone’s objection. It is necessary, but everyone does it - and no one is satisfied with the contradiction here. Edward here presents a brave and frank vision of his life, a vision that we are forced to deny and avoid talking about under the pretext of chastity and modesty. Therefore, it is difficult to find such frank biographies among Arab authors. If you write a similar book, you will most likely be buried in your grave as a disgrace to your family.
"I was jogging behind him, while he was fast paced, with his hands tied behind his back. I stumbled and fell to the ground. He made deep scratches on my hands and knees, so I instinctively shouted to him: (Daddy... please). He stopped and turned slowly to me. He stayed like that for no more than two seconds, then he turned around and continued walking. "Without a word. And that was all. He died like that, turning his face to the wall, without making a sound. I wonder if he ever wanted to really say more than he said."
This book was somewhat of a disappointment to me because I expected that it would explain his later life period, his views and ideas, and from there I would be able to access his writings. But despite everything, this is a book rich in strong and influential characters with whom Edward had a relationship since his childhood due to his social position. We can also learn about the environment that created one of the most important voices defending Palestine. A voice that is not ashamed to admit its failure.
Edward was not Arab, he was not American, and he was not British. He was nobody, and this non-existent self enabled him to be anything he wanted and to pursue whatever he believed in. His dispersed self is itself the source of his individuality and distinction from other human beings.
“I have always believed in the priority of intellectual awareness over national or tribal awareness, no matter how lonely that belief made me feel.”
history philosophy
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Officer
Author 3 books112 followers
March 1, 2010
Initially, Edward Said's memoir was a bit slow-moving. I guess I expected him to speed through the major events in his life up until the time he started writing it--but he focused mainly on his childhood and school days. It's fascinating to me that he still remembered such marked details--names of teachers, other students, etc.
His narrative jumped around a bit and was repetitive at times, but just reading about his life, his thoughts, his analysis on his relationship with his family, etc was fascinating. He is so frank and honest, esp. when talking about his own weaknesses (and perceived weaknesses). One of my favorite lines is advice his Aunt gives him: "If you think of everything you must do as present before you, to be done all at once, you'll cripple yourself. Time obliges you to do them in sequence, one at a time, and this, dissolves the burden almost immediately."
Wish he was alive to write part two--one that focused on his graduate school years, his early years as a professor, and how he became active in Palestinian advocacy.
literature palestine
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Anything
163 reviews90 followers
January 31, 2022
The book is nice and the feelings in it are gentle and sincere..
but unfortunately I read in my mood and I never force myself to complete the book if I lose the passion and pleasure to continue, especially when the writer tends to exaggerate in describing ordinary events that do not require a long explanation and many pages..
The rating is no less. From half the book I read..
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Andrew
2,057 reviews769 followers
ReadSeptember 6, 2016
From the man who wrote some of the most impassioned, crystal-clear prose to challenge contemporary discourse comes an equally impassioned, unapologetic memoir. On one hand, it's the story of a socially awkward kid from an upper middle class family, much like any other, and on the other hand it's the story of dislocation after dislocation. Dislocation from Palestine, Egypt, America, from the English, French, and Arabic languages in their various forms, from his family, from his class, from his ostensible political representatives, from his schooling... the list goes on. He did indulge in some of that icky author-as-sexual-being talk, which wasn't very interesting when Henry Miller or Norman Mailer did it decades ago (and was a classed-up version of "look how many chicks I nailed, bro"), was OK when Philip Roth did it because at least he was funny about it, and hasn't been any good since. But, given the scope of the memoir, I consider that to be a minor flaw. If you need a framework for how Said thought and why he thought the way he did, I couldn't think of a better next step after getting Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism under your belt. And if you just want a good memoir to take to the beach, Out of Place is great for that too.
memoir
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Khlood
71 reviews16 followers
December 4, 2013
The CV as you like to read it. You walk along a memory that you do not have, but it raises in you questions, ideas, and horizons that cannot be easily overcome. This is because you are watching another life on paper, due to its extreme realism. You will feel that you are in front of three-dimensional cinematic scenes.
Well, I traveled with Ed from the moment of his birth, and the reason for naming him is not clear. Edward was Edward, because the heir to the British throne, who rose to fame at that time in 1935, was Edward.
To Edward in the Arab countries, and this is more like Fahd or Khalid in the United States. From here, Edward went beyond the boundaries of the place in a way that he did not understand at all. His repeated and vague departure from his origin, language, homeland, and affiliation, and his parents’ desperate attempts to Americanize him at times, and to mix him with English customs at other times, and to mix him as much as possible with pre-determined people, made Edward the troublesome rebel who no one understood and was content with a Beethoven symphony or... A play by Shakespeare to communicate with his family and friends and with this intertwined and complex world around him. As for the reader, his acumen will not help him know exactly which exit is the one that disturbed Edward and made him think one evening while cancer was messing with his blood by writing this biography and exploring the past and people who left a great impact on the course of his life. From childhood until old age.
Traveling is a feature of Edward Said's life. Between Palestine, Cairo, Lebanon, and America, he lived on the move with unstable friends, with a different style of living from one place to another, most of the time. The luxury of Cairo was negated by the austerity of Dhour El Choueir in Lebanon.
Edward's childhood, which I will talk about at length, perhaps because memory supports him more in this direction, was a confusing first years. The spatial displacement was not limited to his residence, but also to the American and English schools in which he studied as well, and the multiplicity of identities and religions under whose umbrella he lived. He says: "I was hoping for a way Hectic if we were all perfect Arabs, or Europeans, or perfect Americans, or perfect Orthodox, or perfect Muslims, or perfect Egyptians.”
Edward had an English name with Arab features, a Palestinian nationality with a Christian religion, and an American lifestyle on Egyptian soil.
Edward's godfather was his mother, "Hilda," who longed for her tenderness and was authoritarian and loved to insert herself among her family members. In his tender talk about his mother, the highest characteristics of a mother and the extent of the sanctity and privacy of what links her and her children are evident.
As for his father, Wadih, he was a brilliant merchant in his field, and an athlete, whom Edward could not keep up with. Their relationship is cold, based on pampering and severe beatings at the same time, insult and stimulation at the same time,
generosity and extreme care at the same time.” Edouard wrote with a transparency that cannot be easily matched, and an iron memory that remembers events, colors, names, numbers, and the feeling of the time at that time and their future impact on him. He wrote with sharp acumen and intelligence and intense emotion. He wrote To say I was there and this is all that happened, he says in his book:
“The main motivation for writing these memoirs is, of course, my need to bridge the distance, in time and space, between my life today and my life yesterday. I just want to record this as an obvious fact without treating it or discussing it.”
Politics constituted a mystery in Edward’s life. It was not a common conversation in his circles, but his aunt Nabiha, a Palestinian activist in Egypt, provided a lot of support to the Palestinian refugees there, and it had a great impact on his life. Edward political.
He was a defender of the human rights of the Palestinian people, and Robert Fisk described him as the most effective voice in defending the Palestinian cause.
Edouard has been interested in music and its cultural and political dimensions since his childhood. He was an accomplished pianist and was influenced in this aspect by Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, and Mozart. He also found himself an educated reader and an anxious isolationist at many points in his life.
“It took five years to write the book and he wrote it during the period of his illness and treatment for leukemia. It is a record of a lost or forgotten world. At the moment of his illness, he felt the necessity and importance of leaving an autobiography about the life he lived and his relationship with the people who lived with him. It is the memory game that enabled him - perhaps - From resisting illness. Writing memoirs is like emptying the past from within us... and shedding tears of sadness over a time that will never be restored! The real and main motive that made Edward Said write these memoirs... is his need to bridge the distance in time and space between his life today and his life yesterday. “
This book won many awards, including: the New Yorker Award for non-fiction in 1999, and in 2000 it won the Ansfield Wolfe Book Award for the same category, and the Morton Dwayne Zabel Prize for Literature.
“Out of Place,” Edward Said’s memoirs. Published by Dar Al-Adab, Beirut, 2000. Translated into Arabic by the wonderful Fouad Trabelsi.
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Sophia
28 reviews27 followers
June 17, 2016
A third re-read of this memoir, which I keep coming back to. Anyone interested in Said's work or in the Middle East in general - or, indeed, in depictions of childhood and elucidations of the 20th century condition of displacement - should read Out of Place. Moving and insightful.
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Ebtihal Salman
Author 1 book362 followers
February 8, 2016
There is no better time than when storms are raging to return to reading a boring, interesting book. Thus, after stopping for several months following the boring story of how Saeed's parents strive to keep him from being a boy, naughty and evil like any other self-respecting boy, I return to reading with greater enjoyment, and I have finally succeeded in noticing how they fail anyway.
I admit that I find it difficult to continue accusing the book of being boring, and it made me laugh spontaneously at the amazing way in which Said narrates the incident because of which he was expelled, at the age of fifteen, from secondary school (Victoria College), in Cairo in 1951, after he refused to read Shakespeare. Simply put, he wants to read Walter Scott.
Edward describes his feeling that day of isolation, astonishment, and fear, and that he had become literally “out of place,” [add to that the physical pain resulting from a flogging party thrown for him by his father], but his ability, after many years, to recall the incident and he wrote it in his biography in a language that was laughable, He tells us how he returned with his family after more than 30 years to show them the school from which he was expelled, as “fun.” He reminds us of the bright side of the saddest incidents of our lives. They create truly entertaining memories.
Saeed describes another feeling as well, which he found a place for himself despite the fear and pain that day: “I was liberated from my body, freed from all the usual encumbrances, duties and restrictions. I have never felt so free and free from any direction as I did then.” There is no response from Saeed that indicates his remorse for anything, nor his intelligence, which led him to peril and was diagnosed as a sin.
Of course, like all beautiful things that do not last, Edward did not retain his freedom for long, as he was sent to the United States of America, where he continued his studies until he became Professor Edward Said, professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, and one of the most important literary critics and Arab-American writers. .
What happened to Saeed sixty years ago confirms that there are fixed things in the universe, and that physics, “thank God,” has a firm grip on the reins of everything, including our lives. The world will fight what deviates from its basic laws, it will flog and exclude those who deviate from it, but one way or another they will find their place in the end.
http://ebtihals.blogspot.com/2011_06_...
memory
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Denmark
7 reviews3 followers
December 23, 2011
Edward Said
is a character full of meanings
that I was noticeably influenced by.
I interacted with his meticulous memoirs, which are full of details, because I had been influenced by his thoughts before. His
memoirs narrate his life in his childhood, showing precise details,
and what emerged most prominently was the issue of identity and the sense of belonging that he lacked for many reasons, such as nationality and the many movements in his life from One environment to another and from one society to another
. He has a sensitive sense, which is evident from his great interest in music -
and his high sense of tasting it and selecting his favorite musicians.
His precise critical style is demonstrated through his description of his life, his family, and the people he encountered, especially in childhood. He seems to be one of the characters who excels at making fun of naive situations in a way that is both humorous and frank at the same time.
It amazed me that he felt weak in his personality, to the point that at the beginning of his teaching work he had to take off his glasses so that he would not see the faces of the students he was teaching.... :))
One of the passages that affected me most was his saying: “...I find myself wondering in my secret.” Whether the system of duties and deadlines will save me now, even though I realize, of course, that my illness is creeping in unseen, with greater secrecy and greater treachery than the flow of time announced by my first wristwatch, which I carried while I was unaware at the time. About the fact that it numbers my mortality, and divides it into complete and unchangeable intervals of unrealized times forever and ever.” ...........
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ZaRi
2,321 reviews796 followers
ReadJune 6, 2016
In my opinion, nothing has made my life more painful than displacement:
displacement from one country to another, from one city to another, from one settlement to another, from one language to another, from one environment to another, from one place to another. Others, who have not allowed me to be placed anywhere in all these years....... At the same time, I also envy those who stayed and did not come on the trip, those whom I see on the way back, whose faces are due to disorder Or not depressed by what appears to be forced mobility, those who are happy with their families, wrap themselves in raincoats and comfortable suits, and stand for everyone to admire.
There is something about the invisibility of those who have traveled and their emptiness and absence, plus that acute, repetitive and predictable sense of exile that separates you from everyone you know and are comfortable with, it all causes Feel the need to go and the reason for that is a kind of self-made priority logic, a kind of feeling of ecstasy and euphoria. But in all cases, the great fear is that leaving means being abandoned and abandoned, even when it is you who is leaving...!
autobiography memory novel
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Alcohol
639 reviews68 followers
May 12, 2020
“. . . I switched to Arabic thinking that our mother tongue might open a broader way for communication between us, but the result was the opposite. He interrupted me in the middle of my sentence, raising his right hand: “No, brother.” - I thought to myself: This is a pure Arabic phrase even though he said it in English - “We don’t speak Arabic here. I left all this behind me. We are Americans here - and this is another Arabic expression.” Instead of saying, “We are in America now,” “We should talk and act like Americans.”
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Regan
447 reviews19 followers
Shelved as 'people-reading-in-public'September 24, 2023
Older man in all denim at a table by himself, Blackline coffee in st. Pauli, hamburg
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LadySarashina
4 reviews17 followers
November 26, 2017
Reading the academic and essayist Said I actually seemed to find a certain gift as a narrator, perhaps due to his boundless literary culture or his unmistakable voice which would lead anyone to recognize his timbre among a thousand, which he expressed full potential in this autobiography of his . His strenuous fight for the right of self-representation of peoples oppressed by a colonial past or by unequal balances of power is reflected in his individual experience, in his family microcosm. Here he experiences for the first time the sense of bewilderment that comes from necessarily seeing himself reflected in the gaze of others. Of the mother, of the father, of the colonial-style institution. The real 'Edward' was being built in the dim light of his room whenever he could deal with his own music, his own literature, his own entertainment and later his more intellectually oriented interests. Only once he was an adult did this identity have the opportunity to express itself, finally overcoming, although never definitively, the different often contradictory garments that had been sewn on him by others. A true coming-of-age story therefore, which accompanies us in the biographical story of one of the greatest thinkers of the past century, who revolutionized (or at least left solid foundations on which posterity will be able to work) the perception of the perspective games between "" East"" and ""West""; childhood and adolescence lived in comfort, far from the experience of war or poverty, which was limited to enjoying the warmth of one's comfortable everyday life. Edward's childhood was therefore totally depoliticised, as he lived the colonial experience that would concern him both in Palestine, at the time an English colony, and later in Cairo, which was also subjected to the British crown first and then to the Americans, certainly as a source of discomfort under the skin but basically like the natural state of things. His father's wartime acquisition of American citizenship by virtue of his service in the army would then give him the opportunity to move from Egypt to the United States to complete his studies. This condition of perpetual motion, this having grown up in colonial contexts, having experienced a sort of colonization of the habitus, of the most intimate identity within the family environment at the limits of the most subtle affective despotism, the subjection to the paternal figure who will arouse in him a mixture of intolerance and dependence and the morbid relationship with his overprotective mother who exercised constant control over little Edward which often derailed into psychological blackmail, led him to grow up with the awareness of depending on an intricate network of power relations that they pushed it by constantly redefining it.It goes without saying how much his first-hand experience influenced his intellectual work.
literary-loves
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Ahmed Nasr Ahmed Nasr
85 reviews14 followers
June 12, 2022
After I read this autobiography, I am wondering, how people tell their own stories, how our stories do not stop to take different forms over the time, and how we, the storytellers, could play out with some details every time we tell the story. I sometimes do. My intuition says Said did, too. The man was too smart to tell a straight story.
Also, the storyteller's voice was not the 'actual' Edward the kid, but the grown-up professor, prof. Said after realizing the effect of place/exile on his thoughts' formation.
This is not an autobiography, but Said's novel that he always dreamed of writing. It is a novel till I read his dead father writes his own as well. While being highly-educated like Said, it is easy to give meanings for small dark spots as the worst. Said is gifted with extracting the most nightmares from small bad details. That was his well-done job in his career life. This is not a mitigation of the psychological impact on the childhood of 'Ed.', but an attempt to hear the other's voice (the father) through another narrative monologue. Said would not have been one of the most talented thinkers of our time.
It's an amazing piece of reading for a truly gifted man. I would recommend it to the me-teenager living in a small village in northern Egypt.
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Eisele
184 reviews97 followers
March 14, 2008
This is an interesting book, if just because Edward Said became such a towering figure in the postcolonialist academic world. His family - which was Christian (his mother in fact was a Baptist from Nazereth, his father an Anglican from Jerusalem who became an American citizen when he volunteer for the American Expeditionary Force during WWI), from Palastine, while he grew up between Cairo, Jerusalem, and Lebanon. Of course, after 1948 his family never went back to Palastine, while he went to the U.S. and sky-rocketed to academic star-status.
In general, Said presents himself as extremely neurotic, with a father who didn't seem to be able to express love, and a mother who seems like she has border-line personality disorder. In other words: not so flattering. He ends up arguing that his sense of alienation was an essential part of his intellectual freedom, and he seems to justify his refugee status (even though he grew up in an extraordinarly wealthy family, and when to Ivy-League schools) by the mental aspects of being without a country of one's own.
Whatever you think of Said's politics, he was an immensly interesting figure.
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Dania Abutah
747 reviews477 followers
February 5, 2017
A unique and rare personality, an intellectual and a writer... It is very interesting to learn about the beginnings of Edward Said and the influences that played in establishing his life... from his relationships with his father and mother and changing places from Jerusalem to Cairo to Dhour Al-Shuwair to America, where he always felt out of place.. While he was building his inner reality and finally freeing his path until his hidden true personality was revealed... brilliant analysis and music with the passion of a professor of comparative literature... an enjoyable translation by Fawaz Al-Trabelsi, and do not approach other translations, lest many of the meanings be displaced and become confusing to you.. Shedding light on important figures who influenced him and played an important humanitarian role, such as his aunt Nabiha, who opened her home to receive refugees whose lives had been difficult in Egypt, and helped them with everything she could, and with her attempts to search for sources of livelihood for them...and Dr. Haddad, who established a clinic and was He is treated for free in poor neighborhoods... authentic Palestinian models in exile... and finally, the intellectual’s relationship with the authorities and his strong influence by Charles Malek, who had a completely different position later... Finally, I liked his saying that priority should be given to intellectual awareness at the expense of national awareness. Or tribal, no matter how much loneliness this result makes him feel...his entire work is worth reading
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Fatima Alammar
Author 1 book214 followers
January 2, 2010
How late have I been in reading this beautiful book? This is the first impression I got after a 360-page journey, an impression mixed with admiration, affection, and feelings of gratitude to the writer for the opportunity to “delicious reading.” I found more than one “attractive” element in the book, and I can quickly point to
- Saeed’s narrative capabilities, which as much as I was amazed by how much I regretted that they would never be repeated in another product
- the clever and insightful references to the political situation, “tucked” between the lines, and despite the concerns. The writer's clear politics, but he limited himself to a little here, to the extent that was absolutely appropriate
- talking at length about the relationship of young Edward with his parents - a deep relationship that is not devoid of problems. You will find tenderness and cruelty, encouragement and demoralization, and what is most surprising is that you will read about a fragile, weak and unpredictable child. With the change that would occur in his life later,
but the chapters are not on the same level, as if the contrast reflects - in one way or another - the different states that Saeed was in while writing his biography, moving between treatment sessions and experiencing the symptoms of the leukemia that claimed his life in 2003.
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Ayyad Ben Yedder
98 reviews56 followers
April 13, 2020
Important details for a bus era. He overlooked some details. I don't know if it was escaping or not remembering.
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Fahad Qur'an
304 reviews131 followers
October 31, 2016
Here is Pleasure and Talk of Memories by the great thinker Edward Said,
a valuable book
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